The transition from Severis’s Garden to the Shale Flats felt like being dragged from a fever dream into a cold, wet grave. The air stopped smelling like rotting lilies and started smelling like nothing at all. Just damp stone, the metallic tang of their own unwashed bodies, and the lingering, invisible heat of the God's gaze on their backs.

  They found shelter in a shallow cave, a jagged slit in the side of a gray hill that looked like a broken tooth. Outside, the rain began to fall—thin, freezing needles that hissed as they hit the volcanic rock. It wasn't a cleansing rain. It was a shroud.

  Ashaf sat as far from the others as the cramped space allowed. He kept his right hand tucked deep into the folds of his coat, his fingers curled into a tight, aching fist. He could feel it. The thing under his skin wasn’t just moving anymore; it was tasting him. It was a slow, rhythmic pulse, like a second heart beating in the meat of his thumb, trying to find a rhythm that matched his own.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to use logic like a cauterizing iron. It is a biological parasite. A divine frequency. It is not an identity. But the logic was wet paper. Every time he tried to think, he felt that "Attention"—a heavy, invisible hand pressing on the back of his brain, forcing his thoughts toward the shape of a flower.

  "Reina," Ashaf said. His voice sounded like it had been scraped through gravel. "The suppressants. How many are left?"

  Reina didn't look up from her bag. She was meticulously cleaning a small glass vial with a piece of stained silk, her movements jerky and robotic. Her hair was a matted bird's nest, and the scholar’s precision she usually prided herself on had turned into a frantic, twitchy obsession.

  "Three. Maybe four if I dilute the last one with spirits," she whispered. Her voice was thin, reedy. "But that’s for Guideau. If she hits another bloom state... if the threads start sewing her eyes shut again..."

  "Give me one," Ashaf interrupted.

  Reina finally looked up. Her eyes were rimmed with red, the skin beneath them bruised a deep purple from days of no sleep. "You’re not Marked, Ashaf. Taking a suppressant without a Brand to anchor it... it’ll shut down your nervous system. You’ll stop breathing before the God stops looking. You'll die in a body that's still screaming."

  "I don't care," Ashaf said. He pulled his hand out of his coat.

  In the dim, guttering light of the single tallow candle, his palm looked like a map of a nightmare. The green vein wasn't a vein anymore. It was a translucent, emerald-colored root that had branched out, snaking around his tendons and turning the flesh around it a sickly, translucent white. As they watched, a small, thorned bud pushed upward from his skin, tearing through the epidermis with a tiny, wet pop. A single drop of black ichor rolled down his wrist, smelling of ancient soil.

  "Oh, gods," Kai whispered from the corner. He wasn't holding his mirror. He was hugging his knees, his face hidden in the shadows. "The 'Untouched' is blooming. The world is finally finishing the drawing. We’re all just sketches, Ashaf. Sketches for a monster."

  "Shut up, Kai," Morrigan growled. She was stripped to her waist, her heavy coat discarded. The iron chains wrapped around her torso were biting deep, the metal glowing a faint, angry orange. The skin around the iron was a mess of raw, weeping sores—her beast-side was fighting the restraint, trying to burst through the metal and the meat. She was using a piece of cloth to dab at the blood, her jaw locked in a grinding, permanent snarl.

  "He’s not blooming," Morrigan added, her voice a low vibration in the floorboards. "He’s being colonized. There’s a difference."

  "It’s the same thing to the God," Reina said, stepping closer to Ashaf. She reached out to touch his hand, her fingers trembling with a mix of academic curiosity and raw terror.

  "Don't," Ashaf snapped, pulling back. "Every time someone touches me, the pulse gets faster. I can feel the 'Attention' getting heavier. It’s like a bell ringing inside my teeth."

  Guideau, who had been lying motionless on a pile of furs, suddenly sat up. Her hair, still that vibrant, unnatural crimson from the Garden, hung in matted clumps over her face. She looked at Ashaf’s hand, and a slow, terrifyingly wide smile spread across her lips. It wasn't the smile of a friend. It was the smile of someone watching a fire start in a house they hate.

  "It wants to be fed, Ashaf," she murmured. Her voice was breathy, almost intimate, vibrating with a sensual madness. "You've been so empty for so long. All that logic. All that 'untouched' pride. Don't you want to know what it feels like to be full? To have something inside you that never goes away?"

  "Go back to sleep, Guideau," Ashaf said, his jaw tight.

  "I can't sleep," she said, crawling toward him on all fours. Her movements were fluid, predatory, more like a cat than a woman. She had ripped the leggings off her right leg, exposing the self-inflicted stitches in her thigh. The hair-threads were now weeping a thick, golden fluid that smelled of honey and copper. "The threads won't let me. They keep humming. They say you’re lonely. They say you need someone who understands the itch."

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Before Ashaf could react, Guideau lunged.

  She threw her weight against him, pinning him against the cold, jagged cave wall. Her hands, hot and slick with that golden fluid, clamped onto his wrists.

  "Guideau, get off!" Ashaf struggled, but the curse had infused her with a freakish, rhythmic strength.

  "Look at us," she hissed into his ear, her breath hot and smelling of the divine rot. She forced his hand up, pressing his infected, budding palm directly against the open, weeping stitches on her own thigh.

  The contact was a physical explosion.

  Ashaf let out a strangled cry as the green root in his hand surged forward, sensing the concentration of divinity in Guideau’s blood. He felt a sickening, slithering sensation as the root pushed out of his skin like a needle and burrowed directly into her open wound.

  It wasn't just pain. It was a violation of the soul. It was a bridge of meat and curse connecting their nervous systems. Ashaf’s vision shattered. He wasn't in the cave anymore. He saw the "Harem" from the Garden, but he wasn't a spectator. He felt the vines inside him. He felt the rhythmic, agonizing pulse of Severis’s desire. He felt Guideau’s heartbeat—not as a sound, but as a violent pressure inside his own chest.

  Guideau let out a long, shuddering moan, her head falling back, her eyes rolling into her head until only the whites showed. "Yes," she gasped, her body arching against his. "Take it. Take the rot, Ashaf. Let’s be monsters together. Let’s be the only two things left alive."

  "Get her... off... me!" Ashaf choked out, his vision swimming in black and gold.

  Morrigan was there in a second. She didn't use her hands—she knew better than to touch the connection. She swung a heavy, cold iron chain from her waist, looping it around Guideau’s throat and yanking her backward with a violent grunt.

  The root snapped with a sound like a violin string breaking.

  Ashaf collapsed forward, vomiting bile and black ichor onto the stone floor. He watched, shaking, as the broken end of the root in his palm retracted back under his skin, leaving a jagged, bleeding hole that refused to close.

  Guideau hit the floor hard, the iron chain still tight around her neck. She didn't fight Morrigan. She just lay there, laughing softly, her chest heaving as she tasted the air. "He tasted it," she whispered to the ceiling. "He’s not clean anymore. He’s one of us."

  The silence that followed was suffocating. Reina stood frozen, the suppressant vial clutched to her chest like a holy relic. Kai was weeping quietly in his corner, the sound of his sobs muffled by his knees.

  "We can't keep doing this," Reina finally said, her voice cracking. "We're falling apart. We haven't even reached the City of Glass, and we're already eating each other."

  "We move at first light," Ashaf said, wiping his mouth with a trembling hand. He didn't look at Guideau. He couldn't. The memory of the "connection"—the feeling of her blood and the God’s hunger mixing inside his own veins—was a stain he knew he’d never wash off.

  The rest of the night was a slow-motion car crash of psychological endurance.

  Morrigan eventually fell into a fitful, snarling sleep, her body twitching as her beast-side fought the iron. Reina sat by the fire, obsessively sharpening a small scalpel, her eyes fixed on the flames.

  But it was Kai who broke first.

  Around three in the morning, the rain stopped. The silence became absolute, the kind of silence that makes you hear the blood rushing in your own ears. Kai stood up, his movements stiff and awkward. He walked to the mouth of the cave and stared out at the Shale Flats.

  "They're building something," he said. His voice was calm. Too calm.

  "Who, Kai?" Ashaf asked, not moving from his spot.

  "The reflections. They're tired of being on the other side of the glass. They're building a bridge out of the things we've forgotten." Kai reached into his pocket and pulled out a large shard of the mirror he’d scavenged. He didn't look into it. He looked at Ashaf. "I want to see if I'm hollow, Ashaf. If I'm hollow, they can't live inside me, right? If there’s nothing but air, there’s no room for the God."

  Ashaf took a step forward—and stopped.

  There was a sharp sound. A dry, screeching slide of glass against flesh. Then silence broke in the wrong direction. It wasn't the sound of a body hitting the floor; it was the sound of a world cracking open.

  When Reina screamed, Ashaf understood what his eyes refused to process.

  The blood did not behave like blood. It didn't pool; it didn't soak into the porous stone. It crawled. A thick, dark river of it slithered back toward the mirror shard Kai had dropped, coating the glass until the silver turned into a pulsing, liquid doorway.

  Within seconds, a perfect, gleaming mirror stood where Kai’s blood had been.

  Inside the glass, Kai was standing in a beautiful, sunlit version of the cave. He looked whole. He looked happy. He looked down at the empty, slumped pile of clothes and meat that used to be his body and let out a bright, cheerful laugh.

  "Much roomier," the reflection said pleasantly. His voice echoed out of the glass, crisp and clear, devoid of all the tremors and stutters of the man they had known. "It was getting cramped in there anyway."

  The mirror shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, each one reflecting a different, distorted version of Ashaf’s horrified face.

  They burned what was left of Kai. There wasn't much to burn—mostly clothes and a shell of skin that felt like parchment.

  As the flames climbed into the gray morning sky, Ashaf looked down at his shadow. It was still the shadow of a man with flowers growing out of his head. But now, it was holding a shard of glass that reflected no light at all—a jagged piece of nothingness that seemed to drink the very air around it.

  "We have to go," Ashaf said, his voice flat.

  He turned toward the horizon, where the City of Glass waited. He didn't look back at the fire. He didn't look at Guideau. He just walked, his hand buried in his coat, feeling the root inside him waiting for the next heart to touch.